Fallout New Vegas: RPG with Maximum Graphics

Fallout New Vegas has been available for some days now. The first mods to enhance the graphical appeal are there already. PC Games Hardware offers you some impressions from the gaming paradise on maximum level of detail.

Fallout New Vegas [Source: view picture gallery]

Fallout 3 already had many fans among players and modders. The recently released New Vegas again is targeted by modders. For example, there is the "Realistic Lighting and Color" mod that brushes up the rather dreary coloring of the original game. Bigger texture mods are yet to come since we don't know of any, yet. But we are sure; soon there will be some, since New Vegas has very weak textures here and there. The visual range and the ranged level of detail can - like in Oblivion and in Fallout 3 - be increased by editing the "Fallout.ini" (in "My Documents \ My Games \ FalloutNV). For this purpose, you have to increase the value "uGridsToLoad"; please make sure to enter odd numbers only. PC Games Hardware went on The Strip with maximum details, some tweaks and the "Realistic Lighting and Color" mod.

Fallout New Vegas: Technical Background As Fallout 3, New Vegas is based on the Gambryo Engine. It can deal with rendering techniques like HDR, SSAO, per-pixel-lighting with up to eight light sources, normal- and parallax-mapping, bump maps, alpha-2-coverage, soft shadows, LoD via grids and material shader. Furthermore, the engine allows multi threading as well as CPU-based streaming in the background. Thusly, the developers are able to use middleware like the lighting renderer by Illuminate Labs, Speedtree, Nvidia's Physx-SDK or Lightsprint. Although nearly all of these technologies are implemented in New Vegas, it is still accused of not being as beautiful as other current titles and rather looking like some complex mod for Fallout 3. This harsh verdict might be based on the fact that many textures, objects and characters lack detail.